love bites: a collection of Kinabra
by thir13enth
Summary: 2: Unfortunately their dinner date didn't quite go as expected, and if there were actually any onlookers at the restaurant, they would have assumed that he was crazy—having a meal with a snake that is.
1. first and only

**As a quick summary, this story is going to be a compilation of all the Kinabra I will ever write, starting with the drabbles for K** **inabra Fluff Week 2016! Some of these will be in AU and some of them will be in canon, but I don't think the difference really matters too much xD.**

 **Fortunately for you, Kinabra is maybe the one ship that I can't immediately write angst for, so this compilation just be mostly fluff for the most part. I'll probably suffocate myself at some point.**

 **Day one prompt: my first friend.**

* * *

 **first and only**

 _It was a debate they always had, and this time she wasn't going to take Sorano for an answer._

* * *

It was a debate they always had, and this time she wasn't going to take Sorano for an answer.

"I'm pretty sure that I was your first friend, Erik," Kinana scoffed, pointing her spoon casually over at her maroon-haired classmate. "You didn't talk to anyone when you first moved to this school, and if it wasn't for me, you'd still be that kid that sits and eats alone at lunch."

The other fifth-grader frowned at her, taking a strong bite of the very-stuffed roast beef sandwich that his mother had prepared him.

"Definitely not," he retorted, after chewing and swallowing. "I wasn't shy. Sorano was my first friend. I met her in Mr. Fernandes's science class."

"Yeah right, you liar," Kinana sighed, unable to think of any witty comeback. She rolled her eyes, ducking her spoon back into her bento box and rolling around a cherry tomato.

She didn't mention it, but sometimes it bothered her that the stupid idiot was purposefully mean to her. Of course, they had been friends since second grade so she knew that he didn't have any malice behind his denials and rather trivial arguments with her, but sometimes she just wished that he showed more of the nicer side of him to her when they were together—more than just when she was upset.

"But you knew me for longer," Kinana replied, while at the same time wondering why she was getting herself into another debate with the most stubborn kid she knew on this planet. "And you were _my_ first friend!"

"Yeah but that doesn't mean that you're _my_ first friend."

"We've been friends for three years! That's so long!"

"Well yeah, but you don't count."

She wrinkled her nose, popped the cherry tomato into her mouth. "What do you mean I don't count?"

Erik pursed his lips and took another bite of his sandwich before answering. "Because…I don't know, just because."

"It's because you don't like me, huh? I _knew_ it. I should just go and sit with Laki and her friends instead of coming here to sit with a loser like you," she pouted.

"Hey, no, it's not like that," he corrected, taking a sip from his juice box.

"Then what?"

"I don't know." He shrugged and swallowed, looking silently at his half-eaten sandwich.

"Yeah, so just admit it," she said. "I was your first friend. You don't have to be embarrassed about that."

And as if simply saying the e-word was a cue, Erik's face suddenly flushed pink. He glanced up at her nervously, but she looked back down at her rice.

"What?" she asked, nevertheless, stirring her spoon around at the bottom of the container. She felt a blush creeping up her cheeks as well, and she wasn't completely sure why.

"W-well, I just don't…" and Erik faltered off a little bit before he squeezed his eyes shut and exclaimed, "Well you're not a friend to me!"

Kinana was already flustered, but his words made her heart skip a little bit. "Wha-wha—"

"—You're….you're my _best_ friend," he finished.

And when the words spilled off his lips, his eyes met her for a second, his cheeks a bright red now, before he looked off to the side and ate a small bite of his sandwich.

She blinked, her face the same shade as his.

"So yeah," he repeated. "You're not my first friend, you're my first _best_ friend."

Kinana finally gathered the courage to look up at him. "Y-yeah," she replied back to him. "Me too. Y-you're…you're _my_ first best—"

But then she suddenly stopped in the middle of her words and suddenly narrowed her eyes—

"Hey, what does that mean that I'm your _first_ best friend? I should be your _only_ best friend!"

* * *

 **And as always, let me know what you think! Would love to hear from you!**

 **thir13enth**


	2. change of plans

**For the second day: dinner date.**

* * *

 **change of plans**

 _Unfortunately their dinner date didn't quite go as expected, and if there were actually any onlookers at the restaurant, they would have assumed that he was crazy—having a meal with a snake that is._

* * *

Kinana had many bad habits—namely leaving her headphones in her ears for long periods of times and forgetting they were in there, falling asleep on every moving vehicle she got onto and missing her stop to get off the bus, or texting and walking at the same time.

But there was one habit in particular that Erik couldn't really blame or really admonish her for, and unfortunately, that habit was the worst of all:

His sweet adorable raven-haired girlfriend would every now and then casually oscillate between her human and snake form.

When she first confessed this to him, after his jaw dropped and his eyes widened like saucers upon seeing his newly found friend in college literally _morph into a fucking snake in front of his fucking eyes,_ she explained everything briefly:

"Well," she had remarked, after having turned back into a human with able vocal chords an hour later, while sipping on tea. "It's not like I believe in magic or anything, but one day, I decided to go with one of my friends to a cult meeting, just because we were dared to go, and one of the older women didn't like us. She gave us some look and then tapped my forehead with her finger. Ever since then I've been switching from snake to human. I don't have any other explanation for it."

"Wow, that's fucked up," Erik had told her.

She had shrugged then. "At this point, I've just learned to live with it for now."

And so he accepted her fate ever since then.

At first, it was funny. Weird but funny, and among their friends like Sorano, Sawyer, Laki, Erza, or Jellal, they'd laugh whenever she'd hiccup or sneeze or cough or do something irrevocably adorable before shrinking suddenly into her scaly dark purple other self and carry on doing whatever they were in the middle of doing while waiting for the woman to grow back into her human form.

However, her unpredictable switching between mammalian and reptilian form started becoming more embarrassing—sometimes leaving him kissing the air with puckered and parted lips, just a snake curled up next to him on the pavement; sometimes leaving him carrying all her heavy shopping bags on the way back home from a long day at the mall; sometimes leaving him turning around and talking his head off to the stranger behind him before he realized that she had slithered up his pant leg for safety from getting stepped on—

And sometimes he was just left in the middle of dinner at a fancy restaurant, having ordered an extra round of wine and two entrees with no one sitting in front of him.

Erik sighed.

When the server came back to the table with an open bottle of wine and raised an eyebrow at Erik, the maroon-haired man just nodded.

"Yeah, she ditched me," he simply said. "I'll take the bill now."

He discreetly stuck his leg out to the other side of the table, allowing his no-legged girlfriend slither up his leg to his lap and finally around his right arm, her favorite warm spot to cuddle in while she was in her animal form.

Dinner was still on him however, and although he had the completely untouched food from the restaurant in take-out containers out on his kitchen table, he lay his girlfriend onto the table and made sure that Kinana had something to eat, reaching into his refrigerator for the egg carton and pulling out one of the raw ellipsoids.

Returning to his snake-girlfriend, he held out the egg to her snout, and she flicked her forked tongue at his fingertips graciously before unhinging her jaw wide and letting him place the whole egg into her mouth.

He smiled and tapped her head once he was sure that the egg was on its way down her slender body before he reached into the take-out containers and starting to eat the still-warm human food.

"Happy anniversary, babe," he cooed, with a little tease at the end, wagging a chunk of steak at her.

She flicked her tongue and winded into a small ball of scales—her reptilian way of communicating that she was very sorry about the problem that she caused earlier that night.

"Oh, don't apologize," he said, with a grin, popping the meat into his mouth. "We just had to improvise a teeny bit for dinner."

* * *

 **But actually imagine this as a romcom AU where Kinana keeps turning into a snake at the most inopportune times, lol.**

 **thir13enth**


	3. okaeri

**okaeri**

* * *

Erik touched the metal knob of the door to his home and he breathed a small satisfactory smile, feeling the cool smooth metal on his fingertips.

It didn't matter how long the mission took—because damn Jellal for taking on all the most powerful dark guilds—and it didn't matter how late he came home—because damn Jellal for wanting to make sure that everyone was okay with what was going on—and it didn't matter how tired, wounded, annoyed he was: this doorknob always reminded him that what was behind the door was a loving caring wife that would brighten his mood no matter what.

So he smiled when his fingers wrapped around the handle of his door.

Erik wasn't a naturally grateful person, but just for this moment when he would turn the doorknob and lean into the door to push it open, he would thank Meredy for making him fess up to his emotions and propose in the first place, he would thank Sorano for getting too involved with his life and scouting out a new home for the new couple, and he would thank even the fucking Magic Council for taking Crime Sorciere forgiving his independent guild-gang of ex-convicts and renegade prisoners and allowing him to live as a truly free man.

"Tadaima!" he called out into the hallway, immediately relishing the smell of the warm soup on the stove. "I'm home early!"

"Okaeri!" she replied just as brightly, and he pulled off his shoes in a mess as quickly as possible.

Erik felt his grin stretch cheek to cheek, his arms preparing for a tight embrace with Kinana, as he rounded the corner of the hallway into the common room. "I guess Jellal wanted to get home early back to Erza or something because he was in a rush to get back home and—"

His toothy smile turned aghast when he saw a dark purple snake curled up on the middle of the floor.

"Ki-Kinana?!" he exclaimed, feeling his heart pounding in panic as he scooped down to pick the reptile up in his two hands. He turned her snout to look at her slit eyes. "Fuck! I thought Makarov and Erza and their healer guaranteed that the curse wouldn't affect you ever again! Shit!"

He cradled his wife-turned-snake against his chest and immediately turned tail, heading back out of the common room to get to the damn Fairy guild.

Oh, he was going to have a word with Erza, alright. Fuck the Fairies! He just _knew_ that their magic wasn't enough to cure Kinana from her curse!

Erik growled angrily as he stomped toward the hallway, almost bumping into an all too familiar person on his way out—

"Where you going?" his wife asked him—rather innocently—her hands tucked behind her back as she stepped around the corner. She gave him a sweet smile.

Pretending to not have been completely caught off guard, he stuttered.

"Uh, uh, I thought, you know, I just saw this snake and I wanted to let it out, and I just—" he explained, showing the raven-haired woman the snake that rested calmly in his right hand.

"Bullshit," she said, a proud smirk on her face. "You were freaking out. You thought that snake was me, didn't you?"

He gave her a defeated look. "You got me," he admitted.

She brightened, clasping her hands together before hugging him. "Yay! I was finally able to prank you!" she exclaimed.

He gave her a short kiss on the lips—short because that was mean of her to pull one on him like that after a long day, and kiss because she was cute and he wanted to anyway.

"You really can't tell the difference between individual snakes, can you?" she teased. "I'm still surprised you were able to find me and not just some random snake in the first place when my curse came back."

He sighed loudly and massaged his forehead with his left hand. "Damn it, Kinana, you really can't joke around like that. That stuff fucks me up. I was really fucking worried!"

She put her hands on her hips and gave him a frown. "And what did I tell you about cleaning up your language?"

"What? Why are you pestering me about this all of a sudden?" he asked, exasperated and placing the snake-that-he-thought-was-his-wife down on the side table. "You know I have a terrible rate of cursing."

"I'm just preparing you. It's good practice."

He snorted, turning back around to her. "For what?"

She gave him a bright smile. "For when our child arrives."

His jaw dropped at the same rate his eyes dropped to look at the positive pregnancy test in her hand.

"You're shitting me."

"Language, Erik."

* * *

 **thir13enth**


	4. decaffeinated

**Not sure how I got to this to be honest. Admittedly I was in another frame of mind. It's another characterization of Kinana than I've been recently showcasing.**

 **Enjoy nevertheless (or maybe try to, haha):**

* * *

 **decaffeinated**

* * *

She sips coffee calmly from her tumbler as the maroon-haired kid strolls up to her, lunch sandwich in his right hand and a cocky grin on his face.

"Yo, how you doing- _kina_?" he teases, making fun of the way she always ends her sentences.

She doesn't talk very much in school, but whenever she does say something, she has a habit of finishing her thought with the phrase—just something polite that she had learned to do while growing up in her last neighborhood, a suburban part of Magnolia—but after her family's move toward the center of the part of the city, she quickly realized that the urban kids were not typically so soft spoken.

And the rudest and most annoying kid of them all, Erik—the one who called himself Cobra—was the one that decided that he wanted to rattle her around just for that.

"Hey, come on, new kid," he continues, trying to meet her blank eyes. "Are you even listening to me?"

She continues to sip her caffeine, not giving him a single fuck and not showing it on her face.

She knows she has a high tolerance for incessant behavior and an even higher amount of patience. She knows that ignoring the talkative guy is the best approach, so she does just that, just like she does every single time during lunch.

She doesn't mind that he sits himself down next to her, and she honestly doesn't mind that he attempts to talk to her, but she hopes at some point the kid realizes that she really just likes to spend her lunch by herself—especially because she usually by that time, she still didn't usually get to her third cup of coffee for the day yet.

And anyone that knows Kinana knows that she shouldn't say a word until long after her fourth cup of coffee—else her words would come out more bitter than the black in her tumbler.

But Erik doesn't know this yet, and Kinana has a filter set so high that it doesn't even really matter anymore.

"Your name's Kinana, isn't it?" he asks her, taking another bite of his lunch. She can feel him look her up and down for any sign or expression.

What will he comment on today? Maybe about the fact that she had a snake bracelet around her wrist, or maybe that she had purple hair, or maybe even about the oddly maroon-colored tattoo peeking from under the seam of her left sock.

She doesn't say a word, and he nods to the yellow-green clip on her head.

"You have your hair up in a different way today," he observes.

Her silence is so loud that some nearby kids around them notice her ignoring Erik. They cup their mouths and whisper in their friends' ears, adding to the spreading rumors that the maroon-haired boy chattering away in front of her _might_ have just liked her.

She doesn't blame them. She knows there's many reasons why he's talking to her, and the fact that her hair is styled uniquely today is not one of them.

"You don't talk, do you?"

She gives him a look and her eyebrows slightly furrow. Does the kid not understand that she sincerely should not be opening her mouth before she finished her rounds of coffee?

"Hey, come on, Kinana," he half-whines.

She discreetly looks at the time. He's been talking with her—rather, to her—for a straight ten minutes.

He pouts. "I'm just trying to have a conversation with you."

She puts down her tumbler, half slamming it onto the cafeteria table.

"Oh sorry, you've just been talking to yourself the entire time that I just didn't have the heart to interrupt you," she snaps suddenly.

"-kina," she adds drily.

She lifts her tumbler and takes a sip of her coffee. Upon slurping, she suddenly realizes that he's gone quiet.

By his face, it's clear that she's surprised him with her sharp tongue—in fact, it might have just made him fall in love with her just a little bit more.

And while this probably meant he would bother her yet again tomorrow during lunch, she was at least glad for the few seconds of silence he leaves her in his shock.

* * *

 **Always listening to what you want to say,**

 **thir13enth**


	5. the five senses

**notes:** I know it's called a _fluff week_ for reasons, but honestly I can't do fluff fulltime and I need to get some angst or at least hurt/comfort out, haha. It's still Kinabra though, don't worry. And I swear the last prompt (happily ever after) will be fluff. The prospect of fluff makes me shiver, but so be it.

Happy Monday, nevertheless, everyone. Written before my first coffee:

* * *

 **the five senses**

 _She paints a picture so bright, it's almost like he had never lost sight._

* * *

Dressed in the moonlight, she would come to him and every day he'd regret giving up the last of his sight from his left eye to fight for his freedom.

At the time, success was tangible. The end of the world was near and he still hadn't found what he wanted. It seemed like all the other Dragonslayers knew their purpose, knew their intention, what they were doing, and so they combined forces to achieve their 400-year dreams, but as usual he was left smacking his dry lips at the dust they left behind. He didn't participate in the grandest battle of the world, but he found something else—

Power. Beyond the power to simply bend sound. With that power, he would not only manipulate the sound that was already there, he would control the entire _sense_ , create a completely new world and build an empire where he had the monopoly on what everyone perceived.

He gladly gave up his second eye. Happiness was just at the tips of his fingers, and so was the knife that he brandished against the last remnants of his vision.

Shrouded then in an infinite galaxy of night, he lay his plan into place, cocky and confident that this was all he ever needed to get what he wanted.

And he was right.

For years, he was the rumored standalone Dragonslayer that no one ever dared to touch. He ruled lands, conquered peoples, commanded wars—all of which he won, all of which he won _alone_.

And that was when he learned that happiness was not at his fingertips. Happiness was actually at the sunset horizons he could no longer see.

So he spent another eternity trying to find his right eye again, thinking that it would lead him to the answers of the questions he had since he was a young child carrying towers of bricks and stone and cement on his back.

He found her in the middle of his journey to find his sight, and by the time he found what he was looking for—and realized that his wishes were with her all along—he had already forgotten all the color in his life, resorting to faded memories of warm and cool shades that language had never properly provided him words with which to describe.

Every day he regrets giving up the last of his sight because he can't see the love of his life.

But every night, she'd kiss him goodnight, she'd send warmth and goodness to his lips—enough to make his eternal nothingness dapple with colors, with light—and remind him that he doesn't need sight to see her.

* * *

 **end notes:** I believe I have just two more to upload before this is all over! My little excursion with Kinabra will come to end very soon. :(

 **thir13enth**


	6. blank space

**notes:** omg. you are all terrible. why did you not tell me that I actually _reposted_ the same drabble twice!

Well. Now that _that's_ all fixed.

* * *

 **blank space**

 _He finally found her._

* * *

It's recognition at first sight.

Not as elegant as love, but just as warm.

Her hair shines with the same shade of violet he has last seen on her scales and even though he can't believe that she's grown two limbs, two legs, he can not deny the way the color stirs his heart.

He steps forward, but Jellal places a firm hand on his right shoulder, holds him back. The other man gives him a look, warns him to not place his hopes too high but—fuck him—he isn't taking advice from someone that shames himself from loving his scarlet.

"Cu-Cubelios!" he exclaims, even though he's sure that that isn't her name…her _human_ name.

She turns around anyway, and he feels his eyes widen when—

he sees the blank in her face, the empty of her eyes, and the realization fully hits him—the sudden awareness that maybe he's been looking too hard for someone that isn't there any longer.

It stops him in his tracks. His legs are lead and the corners of his mouth weigh as heavy as his heart.

"I'm sorry," she apologizes with a bashful smile strewn over her lips. "I don't think I recognize you. Who are you?"

It's recognition at first sight.

Not as warm as familiarity, but just as clear.

"Sorry," he says. He looks down. The sight is too much to see.

"I thought you were someone else."

* * *

 **end notes:** I know. You can ask. Is the title a reference to Taylor Swift? Maybe. Is it out of context from the original? Completely.

 **thir13enth**


	7. picture-book perfect

**notes:** Sorry about all that angst earlier, haha. Needed to get it out of my system.

* * *

 **picture-book perfect**

 _Even Cobra had to admit that he liked happy endings._

* * *

"And then they lived happily ever after. The end," Erik finishes quickly, closing the book.

The toddler glares at him, very obviously unimpressed with his narration. "Mom reads the story better than you do."

"Well I'm not Mom, kid," he replies. "No one can be as fantastic as Mom, right?"

His daughter sighs and lays down into her bed. "Yeah," she agrees, sticking her tongue out at him.

"Good. We can agree on that then," he remarks, before tucking the fairytale under his arm, kneeling down, and kissing his rebellious young child—who seems to have gotten the worst of his genes. "Goodnight, Saki."

"Night, Dad."

He watches her eyes shut—admiring her resemblance to her mother—before he pulls on the lamp light next to her and retreats to the master bedroom down the hall.

His wife is already in bed, perusing a novel of her own, and he joins her, mocking and opening the picture book that he has from earlier.

Kinana looks over at the text he's reading. "You read to her before making her sleep?"

"Yep," he affirms and then flips a page. "She says you read it better."

"Well, that's because I _do_ ," she contests. "You just read it like it's a chore."

"But it is. I don't understand why you make it such a big deal to read to her every night. It's not like she's going to learn to read faster than Jellal and Erza's kid."

She purses her lips. "This isn't about a competition, Erik," she reprimands him. "I'm just trying to build a habit in her so that she is encouraged to read when she gets older. You can learn a lot from books, you know?"

But then she looks at his unamused face and snarkily adds, "Oh, but I guess you wouldn't know. You don't read a single bit."

"In my opinion, you're teaching her more than just a literature habit," he replies, baring his teeth. "She seems to have adopted your sharp tongue, too."

She replies with a sweet innocent smile. "It's not my fault that she picks up things very quickly."

He finally cracks a smile. He kisses her on the cheek and then turns back to the book, swiping through the pages until he gets to the conclusion, where the most predictable three words are printed: happily ever after.

"Happy endings are so stupid," he says, wrinkling his nose in distaste as he finally shuts the large cardboard-bound picture book. "What kind of a lesson do kids get out of that? That the world is perfect and there won't be any obstacles that get in their way?"

"I think it's more about teaching kids how to positively perceive the world and grow from all their experiences," she replies back to him, chuckling and poking his forehead. "Or are you trying to suggest that you don't like that we don't have our own little happily ever after right now?"

He blushes a tinge. She's made a fucking adorable point, and he bites his tongue back because he just can't deny against it.

"Oh stop," he says, rolling his eyes, but he knows that she sees through him.

"If you think about it, our story is a fairytale, too, you know? A girl is cursed and turns into a snake, and when she turns back into a human, she's rescued by some random handsome guy that carries her away somewhere safe so they can make a hundred kids happily ever after?"

"A hundred? I don't know if I can do 99 more after Saki."

"You know what I mean," she sighs before kissing him. She closes her book and puts it onto her nightstand, trading the book for his warm arm and cuddling up next to him.

He does the same, tossing the picture book aside and replacing it with her waist, crawling into the bed and making himself extra comfortable.

"Yeah, well, aside from that, I don't like happy endings," he continues, on their previous discussion. "They're not realistic."

She raises a sultry eyebrow.

"Well," she murmurs, whispering into his neck as she falls into the sheets and curls up next to him. Her hand slides slowly over his body, low low low into the covers. "You're not complaining about _this_ kind of happy ending now, are you?"

* * *

 **end notes:** Oh, you don't even _know_ how many times I accidentally typed fairy tail instead of fairy tale.

And yeah, sorry. I couldn't help but end the story like that. Rough transition but I mean…I didn't want to get carried away with the length. xD Anyway, this will be the conclusion of all the stories related to Kinabra Fluff Week (again, thank you **blackbutterfly101** for organizing it singlehandedly - although I think I was the only one that participated, lol...)! After this, will be random drabbles and stories of Kinabra that I can dump here because y'already know that I have too many stories posted, haha.

 **thir13enth**


End file.
